Out of Frame

At a recent exhibition, Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures, The Modern Museum of Art presented a version of Blow Job (1964). It is a 16mm film that the museum converted to a digital file for large-scale projection. We found an MPEG-4 version of Blow Job on YouTube and projected the file on March 6, 2011 as two overlapping beams, just out of frame and to the left of MoMA’s Blow Job file.

Hardware for the unsanctioned screening: Two pocket projectors were used with removable Micro SD cards for file storage and playback.

Blow Job (1964) wall projections doubled.

MoMA abandoned 16mm film for an Epson Projector, Western Digital Media Player, and USB flash drive containing an original copy of Blow Job (1964).

In an adjacent gallery, an Edie Sedgwick screen test file was projected on a support designed to simulate a picture frame or a computer panel. The entire exhibition conformed to this display format for the converted 16mm films.

Photographs of video intervention by Marget Long & Lawrence Mesich.